katrina fraud

[janetg]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060614/.../katrina_fraud

hunt them down and git' er done

[sbp]

Well it is not just victam, the official also does this. I have posted something relate to this some time ago.
One of my friend lost his store completely and didn't got a $ from FIMA.
Now his wife works in walmart and he works in someone's store. And she says number or people at her workplace got $$$ just by saying that they have lost xyz.
One classic is that lady said to FIMA that she was in shelter and due to rain droping on her bed she lost it and they give her $5000 I CAN'T belive THIS ****.

[boxofrocks]

"I'm shocked. SHOCKED, I say!"

[Rick Waldroup]

Hopefully the vast majority of the money got to the one's that really needed it. This is what happens when you combine greed, corruption, and government mis-management. Is it time to shut Fema down and start all over again?

[engstrom]

Originally Posted by Rick Waldroup

government mis-management

Why the redundancy? Ooops, sorry, I don't want to turn this political.

[Abel]

lets steer clear of the political comments...

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

It looks like the word got out very quickly to the con artsist and scam artists that the US Govt was an easy mark after this devestation and the Govt didn't even do some simple checks to verify if the people even LIVED in the areas of devestation. (or in some cases that the locations were empty lots or cemetaries) Some simple things such as verifying that they lived at a stated address were said not to be done, I mean phone numbers given not even verified to specific addresses, same with electric bills, water bills, cable etc all of those data basis were not lost-even doing simple drivers license checks would have eliminated probably 30+% of the fraud at the start. No checks to see how many checks were being sent to a single address-one scammer submitted claims under 13 false ID's all being sent to the same address (this should have sent alarms off for someone to physically go to the address and individually meet the applicants-even using a local govt employee to do this).

People being paid stipends to pay for rent and the landlords being paid direct! Very BASIC principles of AUDITING were not followed by the Government in how they handled this and they are blowing smoke if they say they can get back the money! But they can be all over a Military Contractor who wants to use a $.10 bolt vs a $.08 bolt on a piece of equipment.

What really was a kicker were people who were renters of property in New Orleans who were given over 6 months of free rent, yes they lost some possesions but they didn't loose real estate!

This irks me to the extreme and what is sad that even after they knew the system was a disaster and they were getting ripped off right and left they kept shoveling money out the door.

Heard that they were buying ice like crazy to take down to the area paying some drivers hundreds of dollars a day to stay parked a few hundred miles away and running their trucks to keep the ice frozen instead of finding local cord storage locations to store the ice until needed-actually a lot of it was sent for storage in Kansas City where it probably is still setting or has been dumped since it has probably gotten old and contaminated-we are talking TENS of MILLIONS of $$$ on ICE that was never USED! (Wall Street Journal had a great story about the Ice fiasco early this year).

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

LA Times article on the subject
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...ent-editorials